[*1] INTRODUCTION

Monroe E. Price

          Observers of the harsh ethnic conflicts of the 1990s, which disturb the glow of a post-Cold War peace, often remarked upon a new and dangerous tendency: the increased use of the media—and especially the electronic media—to encourage and sustain genocidal tendencies. Crudity and skill combined to produce propaganda extraordinary in terms of the nature and endurance of the resulting conflict, and the brutality of the elements of force. But this broadcasting-based genesis also had a significant impact on the texture and challenges of the post-conflict environment. A great deal has now been written about the patterns of media exploitation as they contribute to a vortex of destruction. Less has been elaborated about the efforts of international governmental organisations ("IGOs") and non-governmental organisations ("NGOs") to intervene so as to maintain a more stable and peaceful world order either in anticipation of conflict, during the conflict or in the ordeal following the conflict. This paper focuses, as a background for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization ("UNESCO") Geneva Conference, in May 2000, on post-conflict patterns that emerge, primarily drawing from four case studies—Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Rwanda, and Cambodia.

BACKGROUND

          After Rwanda, and after the seeds of hate were cast in Yugoslavia, proposals began to be made for concerted action by the international community to forestall genocidal use of broadcast media that promoted or accentuated devastating, often genocidal, conflict. Some proposed an "information intervention unit" of the United Nations to respond to broadcasting efforts that might be used to incite violence in troubled areas.  Such a unit would have three primary functions: "monitoring, peace broadcasting, and, in extreme cases, jamming radio and television broadcasts.  It became a matter of common understanding to point to the explosive mobilisingrole Radio-Television Libre des Milles Collines ("RTLM") had in Rwanda with its [*2] repetitious and explicit incitement for Hutu to slaughter Tutsi. That became the textbook example where preventive intervention by the international community should have been deemed suitable and, perhaps, necessary. Information intervention would be a way to broaden the range of intermediary opportunities available to the UN, NATO, or the United States as it engaged in peacekeeping measures in ethnic and other conflicts. There were increased voices contending that the world community's failure to halt the genocide in Rwanda exposed the weakness of an international system that forces states to choose between the extremes of massive, armed humanitarian intervention and mere symbolic action. Given the rise in the potential for conflict-fostering and genocidal media, the time had come to develop, refine, and institutionalise information-based responses to what Jamie Metzl called "incendiary mass communications."

          The problem of what to do when the flames of conflict were temporarily under control, and when the effort at reconstruction would begin, posed different problems. In Cambodia, as a result of the 1991 Paris Agreements, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia  ("UNTAC"), sought techniques and approaches to alter the structure and practice of information distribution prior to the 1993 elections. Shortly thereafter, underthe Dayton Accords, Stabilisation Force ("Sfor"), the Office of High Commissioner, together with OSCE and a wide variety of NGO's, took steps to reshape and reform the media space in Bosnia-Herzegovina, recognising the critical relationship of altering the media as part of reconstructing society. It became clear that a new approach by the international community was emerging, with vastly important constitutional, political, and structural implications. All of a sudden, the kind of machinery of administration was put in place, regarding the structure of media, that had not been seen as an imposition of the international community for almost half a century. In addition to the function of several international organisations, a variety of NGO's entered the field, also intent on building a media system that would contribute to achieving a more stable, plural, democratic society. Only recently, in Kosovo, variations on the Bosnia-Herzegovina themes were repeated, as the Office of Security and Cooperation in Europe ("OSCE") was given administrative responsibilities for reconstructing the devastated Kosovar infrastructure in connection with peacekeeping there.

          Taken all together, in Bosnia, in the ensuing Kosovo theatre, in Cambodia and Rwanda and in relation to peacekeeping efforts worldwide, it could be said that two approaches, dichotomous to some extent, were tested, though the objectives were similar. First, there have been those who believed that to counter war and hate propaganda in most post-conflict situations, the international governmental organisations (however constituted) had to create alternative media outlets that were, at least initially, under IGO control. These modes often preempt media outlets associated with the belligerents or opposing ethnic factions. The logic is simple: to achieve content that is neutral and peace-oriented, a structure that is neutral and peace-oriented is required.

          A second approach, fostered and encouraged more by NGOs than IGOs, appears less controlling. It focuses on strengthening local, indigenous media outlets, particularly those that strike a new voice, in the hopes of building a public sphere, a civil society, and the long-term machinery for peace and reconstruction. The [*3] idea has been that constructing a network independent of the IGO's means that there would be a heritage of non-partisan information, the infrastructure for a pluralism would be established, and an informed electorate would emerge.

          It is the function of this review paper to set the stage for discussing the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, for debating the appropriateness of various techniques in particular contexts, and for discussing their harmony, immediately and over the long run with deeply-held free speech principles. The studies that are included, most by outstanding journalists familiar with the regions, canvas the varying strategies and comment on their efficacy in the recent zones of experience (Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo).

          Based on the papers, we can ask whether these two approaches are truly dichotomous. We can also examine some of the benefits and drawbacks that underlie each approach. For example, imposing or constructing an alternate, imposed, media can alienate substantial portions of an indigenous population. The population may perceive that the press is administered, or too closely associated with international organisation and government funding, thereby resulting with the perception as foreign, alien, and to be spurned for the media that had their allegiance before. Local journalists sometimes resist working for those deemed outsiders or react negatively to the control that intergovernmental organisations exercise over the display of information that these outlets direct at the local journalists' own countrymen. When these internationally-sponsored media are successful, on the other hand, because of their relative affluence, the best journalists might be siphoned off from the local media, weakening the long-term potential for developing a civil society. Composing editorial teams can also be extremely sensitive and these teams are often built at the expense of local media outlets who often cannot compete with the alternative media in terms of employee work conditions and output quality. Finally, investment costs in creating the alternative media outlets can be very high and, once the international mandate is complete and the established infrastructure withdrawn, an immense void in the information space can be left.

          Focusing primarily on local, indigenous media outlets also has its drawbacks. In post-conflict contexts where the society was torn asunder through words as well as other weapons, almost all stations are often affiliated with a highly partisan political party or a local power. Patterns of professional journalistic ethics and responsibility are often in decline and, as a result, the level of professionalism of local media outlets is often relatively low when measured against international standards. This lack of professionalism further undermines any claim of independence that these local media outlets claim. Neutrality and objectivity may not be the currency of the day. The international community often feels itself threatened by the lasting embers of bitterness as displayed in the media while local and foreign journalists may also become victims of intimidation or violence.

FACTORS FOR ANALYSIS

          As one reviews the four instances of international media intervention in a post-conflict environment, it should be against a purposive background: given military concerns, inordinately difficult circumstances on the ground, and the usual intercine contests within the international community itself, how can the processes of media restructuring and support take place in a way most consistent with international [*4] norms of freedom to receive and impart information? In distinguishing among the four case studies (and as a way of considering other sites for post-conflict information intervention) a number of other questions might be highlighted:

a. What is the relationship between the structure and role of the media in fueling conflict and the needs for reshaping the media space of a particular state in the post-conflict arena? What was the media structure on the ground at the initiation of the post-conflict assessment? Is the conflict-related media still intact, in terms of structure and personnel? Was there a tradition of media independent of the state, and was such media pluralistic? Is there access to a core of professional journalists with national experience?

b. What demographic aspects of the post-conflict context impact on the nature of the media-related strategy? What role do neighbouring states and their media play in the conflict and post-conflict era?

c. What was the authority of the international community in terms of media intervention as it began to deal with the post-conflict atmosphere? How well established were indigenous NGOs prior to the conflict? 

d. What changes in the environment might lead to shifts in strategies and the appropriateness of differing international responses? For example, what is the residuum of hate and intimidation and to what extent is it affected by the use of the media space?

e. What issues of coordination, among IGOs and between IGOs and NGOs, present challenges to optimal implementation of various strategies? To what extent are the coordinating problems, military versus civilian, short-term versus long-term, instead ones of budget constraints?

          Once we have examined these factors we are better prepared to address, or reformulate, more fundamental issues involving long-term commitments that enhance democratic institutions and develop an environment hospitable to international free speech norms. Then, there will be a better understanding of what strategies the international community should adopt concerning the local media during peace keeping operations and how such strategies can prevent or modulate programming that intensively promote hate, racist, and fiercely nationalistic speech in an incendiary way. Then, too, strategies can be fostered that encourage greater professionalism in the journalistic and publishing community, as well, among regulators. In these environments, special care must be taken to assure that non-partisan information is provided to local populations without exercising control over the editorial content of this information. Finally, these are contexts in which the physical safety of local and international journalists is questionable and, if an atmosphere approaching the international norm protecting freedom of speech is to be approached, questions of safety and security must be addressed.

          With this as an introduction, we turn to the case studies.

[*5] PART II:

THE CASE STUDIES

BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA

Monroe E. Price

          Bosnia-Herzegovina presents an unusually comprehensive case study of the difficulties, in a harsh, complex post-conflict environment, of rebuilding and reshaping the media, both to allow a peace process to go forward and, simultaneously, to rebuild institutions that create a more stable and democratic future. It is an especially important case for the study of intervention and management of the electronic media, considered to have a primary role in shaping public attitudes. Other forms of communication—newspapers, mass rallies, and the various manifestations of civil society—all played their part. But the focus here is on television and radio. The wounds of war, funding uncertainties, competition or confusion among players in the international community, governmental and nongovernmental organisations, debates about first principles of human rights—all of these play a part in a story in which there are few, if any, easy answers.

          In Bosnia-Herzegovina, as in elsewhere, the conditions for post-conflict administration could be found within the war and the period that preceded it. Media was used to spread terror and fan the flames of war in the former Yugoslavia. Several months before anyone in the region outwardly bore arms, nationalist leaders in the various Yugoslav republics began laying the groundwork for war by planning media campaigns. Slobodan Milosevic sent paramilitary troops and technicians to seize a dozen television transmitters in the northern and eastern parts of Bosnia in the spring of 1992. These areas are close to Serbia and had substantial Serb populations. As a result, more than half the people in the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina began receiving a television signal controlled by Belgrade rather than the usual television from Sarajevo. Bosnian leaders begged U.S. officials at the U.S. embassy in Belgrade to jam Serbian television broadcasts. The idea of a unified Bosnia information space, with a national signal emanating from Sarajevo, was immediately fractured, and the stage was set to wage a fierce propaganda war that would precede any actual fighting.

          The Serbs were not the only ones who understood that the key to power and influence was television. Well before any fighting began in Bosnia, Croatian television, like Serbian, was airing nationalist broadcasts discussing how the Serbs intended to exterminate the Croat population in order to form a "Greater Serbia." These incendiary programmes suggested to Croats that they were in mortal danger from the Serbs and that they should arm themselves before it was too late.

          Firmly under the control of the nationalist leaders who would lead the war, Bosnian Serb controlled Serb Radio and Television used the same tactics, during and after the conflict, as Belgrade television had before the war. Croatian television from Zagreb began broadcasting reports claiming that Islamic fundamentalists were trying to create a state where Catholic Croats would be oppressed and subjugated. Independent voices existed, taking views contrary to the official perspective, but they were routinely harassed, mostly unread or unheard, and did little to change public opinion.

[*6] A. The Dayton Accords

          The war in Bosnia, a brutal combination of psychological manipulation and physical violence, ended with the December 1995 Dayton Accords. The military component of the Dayton Accords took weeks to plan and was stated in great detail. The civilian aspects of the Dayton Accords were not prepared with the same attention. The Accords stipulated that the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe ("OSCE") would organise elections that the United Nations would oversee. They also called for the creation of an unarmed civilian police force to oversee the conventional police forces in each entity. Furthermore, they gave the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees power to oversee the return or resettlement of displaced peoples or refugees. A High Representative chosen by the Contact Group would coordinate the activities of the different organisations. The aim of these sections of the Accord was to reconstitute Bosnia's former multi-ethnic nature and create a Bosnian national identity against a backdrop of continuing ethnic hatred and loyalties.

          The Accords specified that the OSCE would set up a Provisional Election Commission ("PEC") to oversee the elections at the federal, entity, and municipal levels. The PEC was specifically empowered to adopt electoral rules and regulations concerning the registration of political parties, voter eligibility, international observers, and other measures to ensure that "open and fair electoral campaigns" could take place. The parties were required to obey the PEC rules stipulated in the Accords, as well as any rules and regulations the PEC would create pursuant to the agreement.

B. State of the Media After the Dayton Accords

          To maintain control over their territories, nationalist Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat leaders clung to their party-controlled media. The Serb-held parts of Bosnia were still covered by broadcasts of the rabidly nationalist Serb Radio and Television ("SRT") and the Croat-held parts of Bosnia continued to receive broadcasts from the rabidly nationalist Croatian Radio and Television ("HRT"). The Bosniak-controlled part of the country remained under the coverage of Bosnia-Herzegovina Radio and Television ("RTBiH").

          The three ethnic groups started vying for more effective use and control of the airwaves in their spheres of influence. Croats, Serbs and Muslims all repaired war-damaged television transmitters on mountains in their respective territories, attempting to broadcast their respective frequencies as far and wide as possible. The Serbian government in Belgrade set up a television transmitter in Serbia near the border of the newly-created Republika Srpska to broadcast Serbian television throughout the Serb-controlled entity. In addition, the Serbian government aided the Bosnian Serbs in repairing war-damaged transmitters. The Croatian government added additional transmitters in Croatia near the Bosnian border to broadcast Croatian television into Bosnian territory, and aided the Bosnian Croats in repairing existing transmitters and installing new ones. More important, the Zagreb authorities used a front-company under nominal Bosnian Croat control to re-broadcast the HRT signal throughout most of Bosnia. Assistance was received from the Norwegian government to renovate and repair some twenty-one television transmitters to enhance the coverage of the multi-ethnic voice necessary [*7] to facilitate reconciliation. All parties in the war were clearly intent on continuing to spread their wartime doctrines during the peace brought about by the Accords.

C. Dayton Implementation and the Media

          Just days after the Dayton Accords were signed in Paris, Ambassador Robert Frowick, the American who headed the OSCE mission in Bosnia, arrived in Sarajevo to begin planning for the elections. Frowick and the other diplomats implementing the Dayton Accords realised that changing the state of the partitioned and nationalistic media was crucial for unifying the country as envisioned by the Accords. Without a stronger multi-ethnic voice, Bosnians—Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats—could be limited to information from their respective fiercely nationalistic and separatist television programmes. If alternative sources of information were not provided across the country, the same nationalist leaders who waged the war and still controlled the airwaves were likely to be voted back into power. For the elections to be a success in terms of the Accords, the international community considered it necessary to play a role in adjusting media practices to assure a fuller and freer debate before the elections.

          The organisations involved in implementing the peace plan called on Bosnian politicians to soften their media's nationalist and provocative programming. The OSCE established a Media Experts Commission ("MEC") as a sub-commission to the PEC. The MEC issued a set of rules and regulations the media was expected to follow that included "providing true and accurate information," "refraining from broadcasting incendiary programming," and running OSCE and international election-related statements and advertisements. It also ordered the three television systems controlled by the ruling parties in Bosnia's entities to provide opposition political parties with the same amount of advertising time as the ruling nationalist parties. It then set up a monitoring group that could write citations for media violations of its rules and regulations.

          In addition to establishing rules governing the existing media, the OSCE helped finance a special broadcast network, the Free Elections Radio Network ("FERN"), part of a project initially started by the Swiss government, to provide "objective and timely information on the elections" to the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina in all entities. The project envisioned reaching seventy percent of Bosnia-Herzegovina well before the elections, with signals equally split between the Muslim-Croat Federation and Republika Srpska. But the Bosnian Serb leadership claimed they could not install the transmitters FERN needed because the roads leading to the mountains where they needed to be placed were mined. The OSCE and the Swiss government did manage to get FERN on the air in Banja Luka, but within days, the Serb authorities blocked its transmission. When FERN went on the air in July 1996, only two months before the vote, it reached only forty percent of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, all within Muslim-Croat Federation. FERN thus had no impact in Republika Srpska, where the population was most in need of alternative sources of information.

D. Office of the High Representative and the Open Broadcast Network

          Even before the creation of FERN, the Office of the High Representative proposed creating an independent television network with the stated intention of providing [*8] balanced information prior to the elections. The network's aim would be to provide "unbiased information" from both local and international journalists as well as commercial programmes from around the world to the whole of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The network came to be known as the Open Broadcast Network ("OBN"). The then-High Representative, Carl Bildt, developed the concept during February and March 1996 and announced it in April. Governments and NGOs committed to establishing the OBN included the United States Information Agency ("USIA"), member states of the European Union ("EU"), both bilaterally and through the European Commission ("EC"), and the Soros Foundation's Open Society Institute ("OSI").

          From the outset, there were two opposing concepts regarding the structure of OBN. The first was to build a new network with journalists covering all sides of the ethnic conflict, as well as a large number of staff and officers brought from outside the country. The second concept was to provide training to the existing independent stations, then build an affiliate network that would connect them. Although the then-High Representative, Carl Bildt, had advocated the first version, nearly all the donors wanted the latter. They argued that a wholly new operation would have been perceived as imposed and would therefore lack credibility among Bosnians on all sides. By August, just a month before the elections, OBN was still not on the air and both the peace mediators and the donor nations realised that the project's impact on the September elections would be negligible.

          The OHR, OSI, USIA and the EU continued with the project, finally creating a network of television stations that went on the air a few days before the election. Only a handful of stations, all but one in the Muslim-Croat Federation, agreed to be a part of the OBN. Only an estimated one-third of the Bosnian population could see it, with no coverage in Republika Srpska. And for its debut, the opening credits were written on a piece of paper, crookedly held by a pair of visible hands.

          FERN and OBN were not successful in their goal of creating a more pluralistic media across Bosnia-Herzegovina before the elections. Neither were other attempts to alter the media environment. UNESCO established a programme bank in Sarajevo. It asked European countries to donate some of their national broadcasting about history, arts and culture. These programmes would be broadcast on television stations across Bosnia-Herzegovina, helping to improve content and to avoid piracy. However, the effort had little success in producing more balanced broadcasts from the television stations. NATO troops also made an effort to spread alternative information. They created their own radio station, Radio Mir, or Peace Radio. USAID sponsored election advertisements that called on Bosnians in both entities to utilise their right to vote to ensure "peace, democracy and the future of their country." The OSCE ordered all three party-controlled television stations to air the advertisements. However, according to local Bosnian newspapers, much of the population viewed the ads as condescending.

          Despite the negligible impact of the respective efforts of OBN, FERN, NATO and the others to provide the most ill-informed public with more objective information, and despite the fact that the nationalistic, party-controlled television stations in each entity continued to have the most influence over the respective ethnic populations, the OSCE went ahead with the September 1996 national elections. Not surprisingly, the same nationalist leaders [*9] who led their respective peoples through four years of war were re-elected.

          Although the national elections were over, the international community in Bosnia-Herzegovina placed an emphasis on establishing an independent and pluralist media in the country, with preference that it could be accomplished before the municipal elections were to take place the following year, in September 1997. The donors held another meeting, this time in Brussels, in October 1996, one month after the national elections. They agreed to continue supporting OBN until it became profitable, which they estimated could take anywhere from three to five years.

          Even with the pledged support, the network was plagued with difficulties. The various sponsors started bickering with each other over how the network should be run. The Bosnia-Herzegovina state communications directorate sent a letter to the OHR accusing the international community itself of violating international law by, in effect, granting a license to OBN without coordinating with the legal authorities of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and a complaint was filed with the International Telecommuni-cation Union, claiming interference with the existing frequencies.

          As the difficulties grew, it became clear that neither the Bosnians nor the donors were happy with OBN and that few people were watching it. Finally, in April 1997, the OSI withdrew its money and support, dealing the biggest blow yet to the network. There were rumours that the whole project would collapse. But the donor nations and the EU vowed to continue financing the project and, in August 1997, OHR hired a new team of Bosnians and trained them to run the station.

E. Direct Aid- USAID, SOROS, EC/EU, and Others

          OBN was not the sole mode used by USIA and USAID, among others, to create and develop a more pluralistic press. Europe and Newly Independent States ("ENI"), part of USAID, were disbursing contracts to Internews and IREX to provide training and buy equipment for television stations other than OBN. The Office of Transition Initiatives ("OTI"), another branch of USAID, established offices in Banja Luka, Sarajevo, Tuzla, and Zenica and began providing direct grants to independent media. OTI disbursed 6.3 million dollars to media in Bosnia-Herzegovina between February 1996 and November 1998.

          By the spring of 1997, the situation had changed somewhat. Several months before the municipal elections, the U.S. had decided to back Biljana Plavsic, a one-time Karadzic associate who had turned against the war-time leader and established a stronghold in Banja Luka. A tendency on the part of a local media source to favour Plavsic was likely to yield greater U.S. financial support. In the spring of 1997, OTI gave out $4 million dollars in media grants to 19 newspapers, 27 radio stations and 8 television stations. Few, if any, independent sources of news and information had been available in Republika Srpska in the spring of 1996, but by the next year, television, radio, and newspapers supported by OTI helped inform the public about the power struggle between Plavsic and Karadzic. The alternative media financed by OTI attempted to uncover past instances of government corruption, economic distress, and lost opportunities. This laid the groundwork for Plavsic to consolidate power.

          In addition to these efforts by USAID, the EU and OSI, various [*10] governments also gave direct grants, for training and equipment, to various independent media in both Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation. For example, OSI set up a broadcast training school in conjunction with the BBC where young journalists were brought to Sarajevo from all over Bosnia-Herzegovina for six weeks to receive training from BBC journalists and producers.

          In spite of these efforts to create alternative sources of information across Bosnia-Herzegovina, the media remained divided into three mutually antagonistic components based in Republika Srpska, Bosniak-controlled Federation territory and Croat-controlled Federation territory. The respective party-controlled television stations remained the most influential media outlets and the main source of news for each of Bosnia's ethnic groups. The international community's attempts to create an alternative to the party-controlled media had not been sufficient to combat the nationalist television stations, which continued to stir up hostility. Indeed, the respective media were not only hostile towards each other, but also towards the international community and Sfor. Sfor and the OHR felt that much of their work toward reconciliation was being jeopardised by the news and propaganda of nationalist television and radio.

          In 30 May 1997, the members of the Steering Board ("Board") of the Peace Implementation Council ("PIC") of the Contact Group had their semi-annual meeting in Sintra, Portugal, to review the progress of Dayton's implementation. Regarding the relationship between the media and the Dayton Accords, the Board concluded that more needed to be done to "encourage independent publishers and broadcasters," in order to prepare the ground "for the elections [and enable] wider access to information and promote political pluralism." These conclusions were formalised in the Sintra Declaration ("Declaration"), which OHR treated as an extension of the Accords, though neither the elected Bosnian officials nor the original signatories to the Accords were required to sign the Declaration.

          The Declaration attempted to encourage independent media in a variety of ways. In addition to calling for more support for the development of OBN, the Declaration called on the authorities of Bosnia-Herzegovina to "give every possible form of practical assistance with respect to licenses, frequencies, free access by the High Representative to news media and the ability of the OBN and other independent media to broadcast." The Declaration then stated that The High Representative, "has the right to curtail or suspend any media network or programme whose output is in persistent and blatant contravention of either the spirit or letter of the Peace Agreement."

F. Seizure of Transmitters

          This last extraordinary provision of the Sintra Declaration seemed to establish the power of Sfor and the OHR to block media outlets throughout Bosnia and that power was exercised in the seizure of television towers in Republika Srpska. For more than six months in late 1997 and 1998, the NATO Stabilisation Force, under orders from the Office of the High Representative controlled key broadcast transmitters there for "security protection." In the midst of a key election, a candidate, Biljana Plavsic, favoured by the international community, to oppose and succeed Radavan Karadzic in Republika Srpska was being attacked viciously on the electronic media. She was portrayed by SRT as a "traitor to the Serb [*11] nation" and a "pawn of the international community." Unless Plavsic could more effectively reach the people receiving broadcasts from SRT, her chances of winning the electoral battle were considered slim.

          For this and other reasons concerning the suppression of certain virulently anti-Sfor sentiments, calls for action and reactions to these calls escalated. On August 14, a high ranking U.S. Senator suggested that U.S. planes jam SRT signals while simultaneously transmitting "broadcasts that depict the true reasons for [the Serbian people's] isolation and poor standing in the international community." The Bosnian Serb information minister, Miroslav Toholj, stated that any U.S. administration operation to jam SRT would be considered an act of war. Several days later, on August 18, OHR requested that SRT broadcast a statement intended to inform the Serb public about the content of the Sintra Declaration and the obligation of leaders on all sides in Bosnia to abide by it. SRT refused and in a fateful report it compared Sfor with the Nazis and referred to them as "occupying forces." With the logo "SS-for" instead of S-for, the broadcast alternated images of Sfor soldiers with World War II German Stormtroopers.

          In response, on August 23, the new High Representative, Carlos Westendorp, sent a letter to Momcilo Krajisnik, the Serb member of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Presidency demanding that SRT broadcast an OHR statement explaining the Sintra Declaration by 10 PM that day. Westendorp called the broadcast comparing Sfor to Nazis "absolutely unacceptable." He suggested Sfor might take action by seizing television towers to stop the Pale media propaganda against the peace forces in Bosnia. SRT promptly submitted to Westendorp's demand, and broadcast the statement before the deadline though the station complained that the High Representative's actions exceeded the bounds of the Dayton Accords and re-broadcast the clip comparing Sfor to the Nazis.

          On August 22, in the next step of what became the transformation of SRT, U.S. troops seized a television broadcast tower in Udrigovo, a northeastern town, under the pretence that they were trying to prevent possible clashes between Plavsic's supporters and Karadzic's supporters. A week later, pursuant to an agreement, Sfor handed the tower back to the SRT authorities in Pale. Included in the agreement were the following conditions: that the media of the Serb Republic stop producing inflammatory reports against Sfor and the other international organisations implementing the Dayton Accords; that SRT Pale would regularly provide an hour of prime time programming to air political views other than those of the ruling party; that SRT Pale provide the High Representative with a daily half hour of prime time programming to introduce himself and talk about recent developments; and that the Serb Republic agree to abide by all the rules being established by what would become the international community's Media Support Advisory Group.

          On September 26, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Louise Arbour, gave a press conference in Sarajevo, which was covered by SRT. An SRT Pale announcer introduced Arbour's press conference with a commentary claiming that the Tribunal was a political instrument and that it was prejudiced against the Serbs. The United Nations, which is a member of the MSAG, considered this a breach of prior understandings and demanded that SRT Pale [*12] make a public apology on television. On September 30, SRT Pale did so, stating:

          Serb-Radio-TV in this way wishes to apologise unreservedly for its misrepresentation of a news conference given by the prosecutor of The Hague Tribunal, Louise Arbour. We will read out a statement to this effect made by the prosecutor. The statement will be followed by the complete and unedited footage of the news conference given by Judge Arbour last Friday, during her visit to Bosnia-Herzegovina.

          In spite of SRT Pale's apology, Sfor troops seized control of certain SRT transmitters the next day (October 1), thereby preventing SRT Pale from transmitting its broadcasts. They would not be returned from Sfor protection until there was a change in leadership among the Bosnian Serbs, and then not until April 1998.

G. Comprehensive Media Reform and the Independent Media Commission

          The OHR recognised the peril of failing to provide clear and consistent guidelines to the media actors in Bosnia but, instead, intervening on a case-by-case basis. It decided to comprehensively reform the entire regulatory media regime in Bosnia. It determined to create an entire framework—an architecture of media law—with objective standards and a mechanism to determine whether a media violation occurred and the proper sanction for each violation. The reform sought to put into place a new legal system with tribunals, enforcement mechanisms, and licensing agencies with the result that the media system would no longer be "ethnically based and directly or indirectly associated to the main mono-ethnic political parties."

          What would ultimately become the Independent Media Commission started life as the Intermediate Media Standards and Licensing Commission. This Commission absorbed the election-related functions of the Media Experts Commission and required all broadcasters to meet a set of internationally recognised standards of broadcasting in order to obtain a license. The OHR expected to create a judicial body with "powers of sanction to ensure compliance" with the rulings of the Commission. The aspiration was that international experts, and Bosnian representatives from both the Federation and Republika Srpska would staff the Commission.

          This new reform was based on a December 1997 proposal to the OHR. According to this proposal, the intermediate Commission would remain in operation until institutions that could perform the functions of the Intermediate Commission were in place at the national level, the entity level, or the canton levels. The proposal justified this comprehensive action because "monolithic control allowed broadcasting in Bosnia to be used as a means to divide the ethnic communities." Not only was it true that "the distribution of poisonous propaganda was a major contributor to the war," but "it is still used to indoctrinate the communities." The OHR considered the Commission and comprehensive legal reform necessary to avoid a situation where the media "emphasiz[ed] separatism" and thus "h[eld] back the peace process."

          Since the OHR felt that the systemic and architectural problems of the existing media model in Bosnia were so pervasive, it observed that restructuring all media, particularly broadcast media, in accordance with internationally accepted standards was the only way to achieve "pluralism and [*13] inter-entity broadcasting." The new system would include "codes of conduct for programme content," modelled on "the established practice[s] in Western European democracies and in North America." The proposal provided that these codes would also apply to the press and the Internet. Until state agencies were established (and approved), the Intermediate Commission would establish, regulate, and enforce the Codes.

          The Commission was to have three divisions. The first division was an all-media complaints commission. It would affirmatively monitor the press and broadcast media, investigate complaints regarding violations of the codes of practice, and recommend action on those complaints it found valid. The second division was a licensing sub-commission that would establish and administer structural and editorial licensing standards. All broadcasters seeking a license would have to conform to the licensing commission's standards. The third division was an intervention tribunal that would rule on disciplinary procedures and provide sanctions and penalties when appropriate.

          The tribunal would have the authority to require "one or more on-screen apologies," or "one or more apologies to be published in the press and on radio." It could prohibit rebroadcast of an "offending programme or its content" and temporarily withdraw a license for access to the transmission system. Additionally, it was empowered to curtail a license or revoke a license entirely. Finally, it had the power to impose financial penalties on either the station or the directors or principals of the station regardless of whether the station was owned by the government.

          By August 1998, the Commission had issued its first comprehensive notice with standards for programme content including a prohibition on the transmission of any material which incited ethnic or religious hatred among the communities of Bosnia Herzegovina and a requirement that general community standards of decency and civility be observed. The media were precluded from promoting the interests of a single political party. The right of reply was required when broadcast material "unjustly places a person in an unfavourable light, or otherwise if fairness and impartiality require it." A newspaper and periodicals press code incorporating many of the same principles was created but appeared to be morally, as opposed to legally, binding on reporters, editors and owners, as its terms were couched in ethics rather than mandatory obligations.

          In the almost two years since the implementation of the IMC, there have been dramatic events and changes, all underscoring the complexity of imposing an elaborate legal structure in a speech-related area in a way that is designed, ultimately to have legitimacy and community support. Stations have been shut down for refusing to obtain temporary licenses, there have been great difficulties in gaining cooperation from the entities in nominating participants, and the IMC has been accused of actions that are strong-arm and inconsistent with its ultimate goals. It is a process still in formation and in need of thorough evaluation and assessment as a model for future post-conflict interventions. Serbia and Croatia continued to seek to use their media relationships in BiH to maintain centrifugal tendencies and, in some ways, to undermine the Dayton Accords. Zagreb's activity in this respect has been even more pernicious than Belgrade's. While RTS news broadcasts from Belgrade have not always been carried [*14] into the Republika Srpska, depending on the fluctuating relationship between Bosnian Serb leaders and the Milosevic regime, all three channels of HRT television have been carried around the clock into southern, western, central, and northern Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the continuing attempt to make the Sfor mission effective, these retransmissions were seen as threatening the peacekeeping mission, interfering with the potential for fair elections and making difficult the possibility of shaping a multi-ethnic trans-regional identity. Ultimately, though political change in Croatia affects events markedly, this process of retransmission led to transmitter seizures and station closedowns as recently as this year.

          A report on the conditions for the granting of broadcast licenses, in October, 1999, outlined problems as the IMC saw them at that time:

          Partisan political control of public broadcasting: The large number of publicly-funded stations reflects continued partisan political control of most stations at the municipal and cantonal level.

          Partisan political control of private broadcasting: Political groupings in both entities control or heavily influence certain private broadcasters through direct support or by guiding sponsorship and advertising funds to these broadcasters from party-controlled state enterprises (including PTTs) and nominally private firms with close ties to party leaderships.

          Absence of a media market and foreign investment in media: Experience elsewhere in Central/Eastern Europe demonstrates that the emergence of a market economy and resulting advertising revenue serves to liberate broadcasting from dependence on political groups. BiH currently attracts essentially no foreign investment in any sector, including media. Few if any broadcasters currently survive entirely on their marketing skills. In lieu of foreign investment, many of the more qualified stations depend on a diminishing, still poorly coordinated, flow of donations from the international community.

          Rampant piracy: Uncontrolled piracy permits oversaturation of the market with non-viable, low-grade television broadcasting, discourages participation by major international advertisers and disadvantages those commercial stations with the skills to survive in a regulated market.

          Absence of country-wide frequency planning: Three uncoordinated centres of licensing operating from 1992 to mid-1998 created major problems of interference among stations and were partly responsible for obstructing orderly development of economically viable regional and country-wide commercial networks. At the same time, certain stations have taken on the character of regional networks, not through normal competitive processes driven by quality or audience appeal but either through political connections or with artificial support from the international community.

          Low-level of programme production and engineering skills: The general absence of regulations to establish quality standards in broadcasting has permitted the proliferation of sub-standard stations that compound problems of signal interference and are poorly equipped to provide any degree of public service. Even commercial broadcasters should be expected to provide a measure of public service in broadcasting in return for access to broadcast spectrum—a [*15] public resource—but relatively few stations are able to do so.

CREATING NEW VOICES

          Blocking virulence and reducing conflict-laden partisanship was one objective of the international community. A more affirmative role was creating a new pluralism through encouraging new free and independent media and, as well, enhancing a public service broadcasting system that would contribute to a unified and more coherent state. Numbers of outlets steadily rose. By the year 2000, Bosnia and Herzegovina contained a very high concentration of radio and television broadcasters; the IMC had given temporary licenses to 272 broadcast organisations using more than 750 radio and television transmitters, or one for every 4,700 people.

          Numbers do not necessarily spell economic survival or a pluralism contributing to a public sphere. Variances existed in strategies between NGO's and among members of the international governmental community in determining how this goal of building an information-based, plural, stable and democratic state should be implemented. The OHR emphasised, though hardly exclusively, the use of its office and the IMC to restructure a publicly-funded and publicly-run public service broadcasting sector. Many of the NGO's, especially those funded by the United States Agency for International Development were geared to the support of local, ultimately commercially supported, but pluralism-enhancing private radio and television outlets.

          Here the difficulties were ones of priorities, perhaps more than ultimate differences over outcomes. OHR and Sfor expressed needs for transmitter locations in areas that were on borders between entities, while the NGO's might have preferred an emphasis in population centres more homogenous. European donors and the European Broadcasting Union came from a tradition vaunting the public service national approach while U.S. change agents were more inclined to the local and the private. The NGO's (with funding from government entities to be sure), emphasised journalist training and an increase in professionalism. The institutions established by the OHR were preoccupied with structuring and implementing a legal system of licensing and modulating separatist content that persists in the further ethnicization of politics. Government institutions were more concerned with the information-content of media while NGOs like Internews were interested in finding ways of making new outlets commercially viable.

          On 30 July 1999, the OHR issued a decision aimed at establishing a Public Radio and Television of Bosnia and Herzegovina and a FBiH Radio-Television (both resulting from the liquidation of RTVBiH), as well as requiring a transformed SRT to serve as a public service broadcaster for the Republika Srpska. A decision of 31 August 1999, designed to bring Republika Srpska activities in frequency allocation and content regulation into line, met political and constitutional resistance from the entity, and demonstrated the difficulty of easily creating or imposing new structures.

          The OHR called on UNESCO to provide assistance in the drafting of a permanent country-wide public service broadcasting law which would be adopted by all entities as well as the federal parliament. The law, when enacted, would replace the temporary decisions of the High Representative. UNESCO fielded a mission [*16] to Bosnia in September 1999 (led by Marcello Scarone and with EBU and other experts), where they met with all entities and actors and submitted the draft which is now under consideration by the relevant authorities.

CONCLUSIONS

What arises from the Bosnian experience is a series of dualisms that cast light on post-conflict issues generally.

· Military strategies and needs have a different architectural form from those of most NGO's and those grounded only in civil administration. At the outset, particularly, Sfor, concerned about its own safety and the success of the peace-keeping mission, was preoccupied with security and the efficient fulfilment of its mission. The immediate post-conflict phase, in almost any context, had its own imperatives. In the longer term, the radical nature of steps to control the information space in time of crisis have to be moderated, as the goals shift to the building of more permanent institutions. Some, especially in the NGO community, captured this distinction as the difference between short-term and long-term goals.

· As a consequence of strategic differences, budgetary and planning conflicts persisted. The urgency and emergency of the initial assertion of the peacekeeping operation involved a need to use whatever tools were available, including the media, to present the authority and policy of the IGOs, especially Sfor, OSCE and the OHR. In the longer run it was necessary to engage in what might be called "peace broadcasting" or promotion of a unified public space. The funding and strategic elements of these processes sometimes were in harmony, and sometimes in conflict with the third critical element of the process: the need to engender an indigenous media sector that would maintain itself in the long run, that could make itself, ultimately, independent of the international community, and that would contribute to a renewed civil society.

· Sfor and OHR requirements to communicate affirmatively conflicted with the need of outlets to demonstrate independence and gain audience loyalty. SRT and other outlets were used to carry, directly, the communiqués of the Office of High Representative, or later, of the Hague Tribunal. The distribution and encouragement of media was governed, in part, by the official need to extend a message that was unifying, mediating, and contributed to conflict resolution. The OHR, the OSCE and Sfor had a deep, important, and fundamentally psychological mission to accomplish. They realised that to accomplish their goals, attitudes had to be changed in a broad and deep way. There had to be a reconstructed attitude toward the return of refugees, the evolution of loyalty to a unified Bosnia-Herzegovina and a respect for the actions of the OHR and international governmental organisations. An illustration: during the war in Kosovo, the OHR and the IMC wished to ensure that the broadcasts within Bosnia-Herzegovina about that conflict were "balanced," reflecting the NATO position as well as that of Serbia. Steps were taken to make sure they were.

· NGOs and, to be sure, the outlets themselves, often had different goals, though not necessarily inconsistent ones. They wished to emphasise skills in audience-building, which might mean emphasising genres not related to news, or recognising the value of sharp points of view in gaining station-loyalty. Cooperation [*17] with the IMC and the OHR, including the direct carriage of unwanted messages, might undermine listener or viewer loyalty to the station, or confidence that it was not serving conflicting masters.

· Constitutional strain between the central agencies and the entities also proved problematic in allowing the media structure in BiH to be restructured. In this respect, BiH is significant as a post-conflict case study: the Dayton Accords had designated a federated structure in which Republika Srpska and the Bosniak-Croat Federation had their own governments and broadcast stations, with the latter reflecting Bosniak and Bosnian Croat Perspectives. The tenuous idea of a pan-BiH perspective was not contained in Dayton as such; it has been imposed subsequently at the insistence of the High Representative. The demography was of divided populations with the desire to provide a renewed sense of ethnicity. All of this dictated some elements of a post-Accords media policy. There would have to be stations associated with the three main groups. There would have to be an effort to build a multiethnic binding media presence. The international community would have to deal with the use of media to continue conflict.

· Gaining respect for the rule of law while engaging in "top-down" implementation of rules: An emphasis on the rule of law resulted in the machinery of licensing, allocation of frequencies, establishing rules for regulation of content, and training and appointing personnel to administer the process. Post-conflict issues involved debates among the NGOs and the OHR over the sensitivity of these rules and their implementation to free speech norms. Conflicts existed between the entities and the OHR over power of appointment and scope of authority. In these ways, the imposition of law and the imposition of the bureaucracy to make law work posed special legitimacy problems.

· In the field of free speech and media law, there existed a dualism in the leadership of the international community reflecting the differences between U.S. and European models when developing media structures and regulations. When the Council of the IMC and other entities considered approaches to media regulation, a consensus between European approaches based upon article 10 of the ECHR and U.S. models based upon the First Amendment had to be found. Similarly, the debate about public service broadcasting took place against the background of two different PSB rationales.

          As with many complex undertakings, much criticism has attached to the idea that the post-conflict situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina was marked by chaos, too many actors, mixed objectives, circumstances in which each country wanted its own signature of representation even if that was inconsistent with a rational whole. The OHR is also criticised for being too dictatorial, too directed, and inadequately responsive. Undoubtedly all of these criticisms are true to some extent. It seems, however, a characteristic of post-conflict interventions, especially those that are multilateral and involve intergovernmental as well as non-governmental involvement, that the perils of crisis management are present.

         Evolving political change in the region, as much as maturing institutions, will alter the role and reaction of the international community to its role in indigenous media development. Political transformations in Croatia and, potentially, Serbia, will have as much influence on post-conflict media intervention in Bosnia as the [*18] direct actions of OHR and Sfor. The international community, itself, may alter its perception of how to structure the relationship between the entities and Bosnia-Herzegovina itself and this will affect post-conflict media policy. And in the best of worlds, professionalism, the building of an independent media sector, and the growth of a comprehensive, increasingly autonomous public service broadcasting sector will combine to hasten the likelihood of a mature and stable democratic state.

CAMBODIA

A. Lin Neumann

          Nearly ten years after the 1991 Paris Peace Accords brought an end to communist rule in Cambodia and the beginning of a free press, the country's media institutions still have a lot to learn. Despite millions of dollars spent by the international community to train journalists and encourage free expression, sadly, professionalism is still rare in the Khmer language press and many journalists are in despair at the state of their profession. Radio and television are essentially under the control of the state and there is no functioning independent journalists' association to promote independence and ethical guidelines. "In some ways our press is too free," said Kher Muntit, a leading Cambodian journalist who works for the Associated Press in Phnom Penh. "There is no code of ethics, no professional standards. It is a big problem for those of us who care about our profession."

          Journalists, educators and others interviewed in Phnom Penh recently were almost unanimous in citing the failure of most training programmes undertaken by international organisations in the last several years. Dr. Lao Mun Hay of the Khmer Institute for Democracy said, "I think the way we have trained our journalists has not been very effective in inculcating professionalism. Seminars are opened and closed and that's it. There is no test, no follow-up, the courses didn't last long enough. Without a real program, it is a waste of resources."

          Michael Hayes, the American publisher and editor of the biweekly English language Phnom Penh Post has informally trained a number of Khmer journalists at his paper, most of whom have gone on to work at wire services or left the country. As a former official with the Asia Foundation, before founding his paper in 1993, he is another harsh critic of existing training models: "Per dollar, the results are low but you can rest assured that every final report of every seminar documented successes. NGOs don't report failures. I know. I used to write those reports."

          If the international community had considered more carefully the dire condition of the Cambodian media, the strategies might have been more long-term and realistic, according to Hayes. "It is very difficult here," he said. "Maybe it takes a generation to achieve real results." Hayes points to a very real problem: Given the genocide of the Pol Pot regime and almost continuous warfare in the country prior to the late 1998 collapse of the Khmer Rouge, the problems infecting the Cambodian body politic may have been very nearly insoluble. Certainly the media, with its emphasis on violence, retribution and political power has reflected the broader realities of the society in the transitional period.

          More than seven years have passed since the UN-sponsored 1993 elections and the pullout of the United Nations Transitional Authority for Cambodia, the [*19] body charged with keeping the peace after the Paris Accords and administering the first democratic elections under the agreement. Also included in UNTAC's ambitious mandate was the establishment of a free press. This was a formidable challenge for a country that had suffered constant tragedy since 1975. First, the Khmer Rouge killed most of the nation's intellectuals. Then after 1979 the country struggled through 12 years of Leninist rule and civil war under the communist regime led by Hun Sen following the Vietnamese invasion that ousted Pol Pot. "Cambodians do not have a common set of moral and ethical values," said Dr. Lao. "The Khmer Rouge destroyed all that."

GOVERNMENT INTERFERENCE

          Bad taste and ethical lapses aren't the only manifestation of dire media problems. Khieu Khanarith, a former communist-era newspaper editor who is the Secretary of State for Information under the ruling Cambodian People's Party ("CPP"), threatened to suspend the publication of two newspapers identified with the opposition Sam Rainsy Party for alleged violations of the country's tough press law. Khanarith, who is technically the number two person in the Information Ministry but in practice is the government's media czar, determined on his own authority that the comments by the papers insulted the government and the King and could incite race riots. It was the first time since 1998 that the government had issued such threats against the press. Local observers became worried that the government would pursue further sanctions as the CPP consolidated its hold on power.

          Historically, the threats are quite real. In 1994, the editor of Samlong Yuvachon Khmer, Nun Chan, was killed by still-unidentified gunmen following a series of official threats. In 1995 the paper was suspended from publication for several weeks, and its editor arrested when Khanarith acted following the publication of articles critical of then-Second Prime Minister Hun Sen. In the intervening years, four other journalists have been killed in Cambodia and numerous others attacked; newspapers have frequently been shut down by official action. Hun Sen's July 1997 coup dissolved the results of the UN-brokered 1993 elections and his uneasy partnership with the winner of a plurality in that election, Prince Norodom Ranariddh and his National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia ("FUNCINPEC") party. After the coup, dozens of opposition-oriented journalists fled the country. Cambodia's most widely recognised journalists' organisation, the Khmer Journalists Association, effectively ceased to exist when its chairman, Pin Samkhon, fled into exile at the same time.

          A related and wider problem is the lack of effective redress for libel and other civil offences in the Cambodian court system, which leads to a lack of professional restraint on the part of the media. While a free press is guaranteed by the 1993 constitution, it functions under a legal framework that allows the media to impugn reputations at will in the absence of professional ethics and standards. Thus the media on the one hand is left to its own sometimes crude devices and on the other is vulnerable to arbitrary government sanctions. This leaves journalists frequently feeling that there are no rules of the road to navigate, other than the protection of powerful individuals.

          The legal environment and formal and informal government pressures are a further reflection of the broader problem of [*20] impunity in Cambodia, in which many crimes go unpunished and corrupt courts and judges have been widely blamed for allowing a sense of lawlessness to pervade the country. In relation to the media, no one has ever been brought to justice in Cambodia for killing a journalist, for example, and many reporters live with the fear of being attacked for what they write.

          The fractionalised political environment has made most newspapers hostage to one political patron or another and also distorted the economics of the newspaper business. Norbert Klein of Open Forum Cambodia, an NGO that monitors the local press, estimates that 99% of local advertising revenue goes to just ten newspapers—out of some thirty publishing regularly in Phnom Penh and 200 existing press licenses; Rasmei Kampuchea alone accounts for 23% of advertising revenue. His conclusion is that most newspapers are dependent for their existence on a web of patronage that has inextricably enmeshed political interests with the Cambodian media.

          Michael Hayes of the Phnom Penh Post put it more bluntly, "No Khmer paper makes money so everything is subsidised by somebody." As a result, headlines often point accusing fingers at opponents, with opposition papers calling CPP politicians crooks and tools of the Vietnamese and CPP papers accusing opposition leaders of being stupid and corrupt. Most observers believe that wild headlines and unsourced stories—especially in the years of coalition government from 1993 to 1997—contributed to the political tension and fractionalisation that very nearly kept Cambodia from  emerging from the darkness of its political past.

          With Hun Sen finally having reached an accommodation with the former opposition FUNCINPEC party following his coup and the disputed 1998 elections, things seem to have calmed down somewhat in the press. In part this helps to explain a shift in the media away from FUNCINPEC and toward the CPP since the 1997 coup. With the CPP again the most powerful party in the country, it is able to set the tone for the media under its sway. FUNCINPEC is no longer fuelling heated headlines, according to local observers. Ranariddh, currently president of the National Assembly and a potential successor to the throne of his ailing father, King Norodom Sihanouk, has reached a personal compromise with Hun Sen. Also, the collapse of the Khmer Rouge in late 1998 following the death of Pol Pot means that the country is at peace for the first time in more than 30 years. "I hope the peace lasts," said Kher Muntit. "I am so tired of reporting on the Khmer Rouge."

INTERNATIONAL STRATEGIES

          In many ways the international community was unprepared for the depths of the problems facing the Cambodian media in a country that has only had a chance at real peace since the collapse of the Khmer Rouge. "Post conflict? We have only had peace for a few months," said Sek Barisoth of the Cambodian Communications Institute. "Maybe now we are in a post-conflict situation." In the years following the Paris Peace Accords, armed conflict continued in many parts of the country, occasionally flaring into open warfare, either between the Khmer Rouge and the central government or between FUNCINPEC and the CPP, as happened for several months following the 1997 coup.

          Stripped of a base of professional journalists by years of civil war and [*21] emerging from the shadows of one of history's darkest regimes, Cambodia's media was in as desperate a state as the rest of the nation in 1991. The few practising journalists had worked for the state media under the strict guidance of the communist government while others had been part of the partisan opposition press, much of it located abroad or in refugee camps along the border with Thailand and supporting various armed factions opposed to the CPP. Pin Samkohn, then-president of the Khmer Journalists Association, said in 1995 that the Khmer Rouge era so decimated the ranks of journalists that he knew of only ten Cambodians working as journalists at the time who were working as journalists before 1975, the year Pol Pot seized power.

          Into this environment, UNTAC decreed that the press would be free as a precondition for elections but there was no infrastructure for a press. New newspapers had to be printed in Thailand and shipped into Phnom Penh. (Now there are a number of printing presses, however.) A communist culture of obedience and control had to be reformed almost overnight, since the clock was ticking on UNTAC from the moment it was established. A free press provision was eventually included in the 1993 constitution after the election and private newspapers began to appear.

          It was never the UN's intention to get into the media business over the long-term but UNTAC realised that without a free press, it would be impossible to hold a real election but without a working press after 1991, the burden was on UNTAC to set up some kind of media in a hurry. This gave rise to Radio UNTAC, a widely acclaimed alternative source of credible news and information that many credit with helping to create the environment that made the 1993 elections possible and led to a 95% turnout despite efforts by the Khmer Rouge to terrorise the populace into rejecting the polls. As the first broadcast station under a UN peacekeeping mission, Radio UNTAC pointed out the necessity of widely accessible news and information as a key component of a transitional environment. By all accounts, Radio UNTAC was popular and trusted, giving Cambodia, for the first time, a widely available source of non-biased news and giving political parties and candidates access to the media for the 1993 polls.

          Radio is vital to Cambodia, which has a very low literacy rate and a population barely served by newspapers outside of Phnom Penh. But when UNTAC pulled out in late 1993, Radio UNTAC went off the air, perhaps prematurely, and the infrastructure left behind was not put to good use, according to critics. In some ways, the international community appears naive in retrospect for thinking that 18 months of UNTAC and the holding of elections would be enough to set the tone for the future. It was just not that easy. Gordon Adams of the BBC, who worked in Cambodian radio education, wrote in the magazine Crosslines in 1995 that there were no funds for transmitter costs, spare parts for the state of the art recording equipment were unavailable, telecommunication links to remote transmitters became inoperative, and the radio receivers which had been delivered to villagers fell into disrepair. In short, the operation was unsustainable, a fact that was compounded by the government's desire to maintain tight control over radio and television, even while allowing newspapers to speak their mind.

          Radio UNTAC's operations manager, Jeff Heyman, countered in an email interview for this article that it was never UNTAC's job to sustain the media. "We did [*22] give some thought, perhaps not enough, about what might happen after UNTAC's mandate expired," he said. "But, to be honest, ‘press freedom' as a goal was not exactly in UNTAC's mandate. Our goal was to provide an environment for free and fair elections, and for the first time in such a UN mission, a broadcasting station was used to further this aim . . . with its role complete, the station had to close in order for the Cambodian people to finally take charge of their own destiny."

ELECTRONIC MEDIA CONTROLS

          That destiny of the electronic media, if not in print, has come increasingly to resemble other authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia. In this sense, Cambodia does not have a free press and the state exercises formal and informal control over the electronic media, with licenses to operate withheld from CPP opponents and granted to allies. It is a process that has been underway continuously since the 1993 elections, according to Cambodian News Media by John Marston (forthcoming in Foreign Devils and Other Journalists: The News Media in Southeast Asia, (D. Kingsbury et al. eds., Clayton, Victoria: Monash Asia Institute)). "The distinctions between corporate, party, and state media, which seemed fairly clear at the time of the 1993 elections, blurred more and more with the formation of joint ventures and the success of the CPP in consolidating its power in relation to state institutions," writes Marston. "Even before the 1997 coup, CPP had managed to dominate most of the large-scale media institutions in the country, and, after bringing FUNCINPEC radio and television into its camp at the time of the coup, was clearly the dominant player from then on."

          With the exception of one very low-power radio station run by the Women's Media Center in Phnom Penh and the iconoclastic Radio Beehive owned by businessman Mam Sonando, Cambodia's airwaves are dominated either by the government or government allies, according to observers in Phnom Penh. For example, the Sam Rainsy Party, now the principle opposition voice in the country, has repeatedly been denied permission to open a radio station in recent years. The country's six television stations, which once broadcast some innovative public affairs programming—including a programme on state TV, cancelled in 1995, which allowed callers to ask government ministers questions live—is now quiet, with news self-censorship the rule on-air. Even major news stories, which are bannered in the newspapers, can be left out of the electronic news. The death of Pol Pot in 1998, for example, went unreported on Cambodian radio and television, according to Michael Hayes.

          This vacuum of electronic information has been partly filled by Khmer language short wave broadcasts from the